Should we all go on a digital diet?
Do you find modern office life distracting? I know I do. A lot of the blame is probably down to the increasingly large numbers of ways that people can communicate with you.
In the olden days, you could work away perhaps with the distraction of perhaps a visitor or a telegram. Then came telephones and people could call you when they liked. Then faxes, then mobiles, then email, then the web, then instant messages, then Facebook and then Twitter. As our digital lives have become more complicated, so too has the overload our brains are facing.
To see if all these distractions were really changing the way I think, I went to Mindlabs in Brighton to try doing a really mundane office task. But it was a task with a difference, my brain was hooked up to scanner and this would measure my brainwaves while I tried to work while being driven mad by digital distractions.
Aside from looking ridiculous in the brain cap, which had squishy, horrible lubricant between my hair and the cap, I did get really stressed out trying to work and being driven crazy by distractions.
The brainwave scans showed that I was having to maintain an increased level of concentration and stress and I guess this proves that we’re all getting pretty stressed at work and it’s likely decreasing, not increasing, our productivity.
The solution? Well some companies like ATOS are being radical. They’re abandoning internal email to replace with threaded instant message discussions, a bit like Facebook. It means you can scroll through everyone’s thoughts on a subject in one place and chose to mute discussions you’re not that interested in right now.
Employers increasingly expect us to respond immediately at any time of day to emails - clients and contacts do too. Scientists say that this is leading to increased absenteeism from work.
The solution? Maybe cutting us off from our digital lives, at least for a few hours a day to get some real work done
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There are 3 comments on this post
I don’t agree that…Sorry, just responding to a txt…..hum,di,da…we are being subjected….sorry, must let Jeff know I’ll be late….to digital overload. It’s a myth being….sorry, must just get the groceries ordered..hum,di,da…put about by journalists with nothing better to….sorry, ha ha! thats a good one, chuckle…blog about.
“Employers increasingly expect us to respond immediately at any time of day to emails – clients and contacts do too. Scientists say that this is leading to increased absenteeism from work.”
From a productivity POV, it is really bad to respond to each email as it arrives in your inbox. Every time you are respond to an email you need at least 15-20 minutes to get back to where you were with the task at hand.
This was becoming a major issue for me.
In the end I decided things like Facebook/Twitter are non-essential fluff for a successful everyday life: i.e. happy, not continually fed-up I wasn’t “keeping-up” with it all the time which made me continually depressed.
— did I mention they’re MUCH too time consuming; I’ve got better things to do, thank you FB/TW!
They’re essentially advertising these days, and I’ve decided I just DON’T care.
Proper colleagues/professional contacts/friends communicate directly, not through ‘advertising’ to each other in an almost one-upmanship on just how exciting ones life is. Hence why most people I know have shut their accounts accordingly (or never had one to start with).
Now I just ignore sms/em’s until finishing the job I’m working on, which is nearly always several times more important than the comms.
I also hate this proliferation of *proprietary* messaging (BBM/AOL/iMessage/What’s App/+10′s others). Wish the technologists could join com methods like sms/em’s together, as most are sick of having to remember where we read x comment continually – just make sure it’s not as bad as the Google Wave debacle was!
Too…